Sandrine Schaefer. Acclimating to Horizontal Movement (Wandering with the Horizon), 2015; performance. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Nisa Ojalvo.

The 2015 Foster Prize is not about latent potential, but about creating an actualized reticulation. In this curatorial framework, individual artists aren’t grouped and isolated, or begging to be anatomized. The resulting “exhibition” can be transplanted anywhere and bears fruit: It is a rhizomatic schedule of events that assembles à la carte meals instead of a tasting menu. For art critics, reviewing the exhibition after its preview would’ve been much like reviewing a book after reading one sentence, as almost nothing had happened at that point. All four artists’ projects are ongoing and contradictory at times. The reciprocating schedule is dictated by the terms of the audience. If you’re running late because of family schedule, the pokey slow train, or any other dog-ate-my-homework excuse, you simply miss the exhibition’s event that night. As no one individual could be at all the events, each moment reflects on what was and will be, as an unfolding, multimodal semiotic chain.

The works of Sandrine Schaefer and Vela Phelan can be bracketed as individual performance-artist exhibitions. Each has an ongoing relationship with the exploration of specific conditions: Schaefer to the body, and Phelan to artifacts of faith. Schaefer is physically present, embedding herself in the museum. She uses a list of verbs with and to the museum: rolling, rubbing, cleaning, reflecting, etc. Both the affinity and distance between visitor and performer are essential to her work. Schaefer’s performances engage the museum as much as they engage her own body, turning a bit into Andrea Fraser à la Little Frank and His Carp. In one action, she rolls herself up into the carpet that runs the length of the ICA’s Founders Gallery. In another, she traces the distant horizon, leaving a hand trail of slime and grease on the gallery’s windows.

Vela Phelan. Obscurus Novena: VII. Obscurus Purgamentum, 2015; performance. Courtesy of the Artist. Photo: Daniel S. DeLuca.

Phelan’s work concentrates on a Mexican folk saint named Jesús Malverde, the patron saint of drug smugglers. He has created a commanding room covered with black aquatic gravel. This dark, anise-scented room is lit only by flickering monochrome videos and serves as a home base for Phelan’s performative activity. A record player or shortwave radio emits white noise to indicate his presence in the building. Phelan’s study of faith and veneration has resulted in several performances, parading Malverde’s bust through the museum’s entrance and to various churches in Boston, in a boat on the Fort Point Channel, and on top of piles of trash bags. During each performance, two anonymous masked men briefly visit him, holding machetes over their heads.

kijidome. 2015 Foster Prize Exhibition, installation view, ICA Boston. (from left to right) Leila Namin. Sean Glover. Sakura Maku. Courtesy of kijidome. Photo: Sean Downey.

kijidome and Ricardo De Lima have used their prize to include myriad collaborators. kijidome hosts two exhibitions, presenting a mix of newly commissioned and existing work with Dennis Congdon, Jesal Kapadia, Tomáš Moravec, Sarah Oppenheimer, Josue Pellot, Nicholas Sullivan, Sean Glover, Sakura Maku, Michael Jones McKean, Leila Namin, Pat Oleszko, Jennifer Schmidt, and Randi Shandroski for Lactic Incorporated. Their exhibition space functions as a low-cost annex for their commuting artist–educator–collaborators, with a scheduled reading from the powerhouse Jesal Kapadia and a performance from Pat Oleszko.

Neil Young Cloaca (Presented by Non-Event, Ricardo De Lima, and the Institute of Contemporary Art). Bromp Treb, 2015; performance. Courtesy of the Artist and Ricardo De Lima.

Using display mechanisms from a 1960s Lina Bo Bardi design for the São Paulo Museum, De Lima has embraced an aesthetic that can be summarized to “amplify voices, share power, respect boundaries, decline ownership.” He invites Jesse Kaminsky to broadcast a weekly radio show, the collective Sweety’s for a residency, Scott Patrick Weiner to exhibit work, and Adriana Dominique Warner to curate in the space. The space hosts dinners, a talk show by David Levine, a film screening from the Balagan film collective, a democratic slideshow event from Trevor Powers’ All Visual Boston, a launch party for the lifestyle magazine Adjunct Commuter Weekly (edited by Dusko Petrovich), and musical performances from Bromp Treb, Jason Lescalleet, Caroline Park, and Asha Tamirisa.

The Foster Prize is a crucial local exhibition, and this year’s reach is commendable, though its pitfall is the lack of context for its almost one hundred individuals exhibiting or performing. The ICA has provided little insight into the conditions that generated this range of alternative spaces and nonmaterial performance artists. The circumstances are left floating in a cloud of anarchic, unanchored semiosis.

The James & Audrey Foster Prize exhibitions are on view at ICA Boston through August 9, 2015.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

The Visitors is a recording of a group of musicians—all friends of Kjartansson—playing on Rokeby Farm in New York. At the time of filming, the artist was going through a divorce and was blindsided by reading his wife’s poetry. He started writing music to fit one of the poems; maybe it was a way to deal with his own defeat, maybe to just have a last moment with his wife by adopting her work. He saw the opportunity to bring together his friends and created a family-reunion-like atmosphere on the farm. Kjartansson selected people, but not the instruments they would play. The group played music in the house for a week, trying out different things for the song “Feminine Ways,” and scheduled the cameras, headphones, and everything else around filming (including a cannon fired twice) in one take at sunset.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

A pink rose
In the glittery frost
A diamond heart
And the orange red fire
Once again I fall into
My feminine ways

The group is composed of excessively talented art-school musicians who have each mastered numerous instruments and can predict each other’s musical quirks. They are more than capable of creating ineffable moments of brilliance. By chance, they’ve captured a wistful nostalgia, but I’m not sure that’s their intention. Kjartansson’s wider oeuvre shows a longing for a time that didn’t exist: for example, the myth of the rambling blues musician—he doesn’t seem to understand that those blues musicians were not really free to travel, they were forced to flee. It would be easy to deride The Visitors as a pastiche of art-school hipster flophouses and rent parties, a cosplay of American beatnik aesthetics. It brings together the pain of listening to a jam band noodle along for an hour with costumes from Portlandia, rendered in HD on nine screens. Yet its optimism and poise immediately gets under the viewer’s skin.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

The music world mirrors the tightening economic conditions of contemporary times, in which fewer musicians get more, and more musicians get nothing. This group has succeeded by creating micro-economies for their work—and they’ve needed to, as their works are entirely too smart, too talented, and too diligent to be mainstream. They occupy a distinct space in the creative economy, at the center of a giant Venn diagram of band member, poet, theorist, alternative economy conservatory/art-school attendee, disruptor, internationalist, business professional, and artist impresario. If the music doesn’t get you, their rugged beards and wispy dresses will seduce even the most all-black-wearing, stern, academically credentialed, anti-capitalist stoic. They hit that spot in your soul where you wish your charisma was, and it’s impossible to resist.

You protect the world from me
As if I’m the only one who’s cruel
You’ve taken me
To the bitter end
Once again I fall into
My feminine ways

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

Recently Boris Groys spoke of the aestheticization of politics, or creating a useless politics that will outlive the ordinary, everyday use-value of political machinations. It would be easy to read The Visitors as a politicization of aesthetics. Instead of creating art-for-art’s-sake from politics, Kjartansson is creating a utopian space where people can play, which is a radical economic and political move.

There are stars exploding around you
And there is nothing you can do

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

The Visitors exposes the way musicians come together as well as how they interact with the passive viewer. Instead of recording in a studio and releasing an antiseptic song-as-a-song, The Visitors is a video of a performance. I refer not to the musical performance here, but the event, the coming together of solipsistic individuals who are scheduling around complicated professional obligations.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

These pro musicians cannot pretend that they don’t have stage personas. They perform with their stage faces, with a studied apathy for the music world and the recording. By the end, each camera transforms from busy character study to a lost potency, from a buzzing house to an empty one. The whole process is an intermingling of modes: an art residency, a single object, and downtime with friends. In the end, they all break character: Exposed by friendship’s piercing gaze, they look into each other’s eyes, and they have to smile and walk off into the distance together, leaving The Visitors soaked in their relationships and mutual trust.

The Visitors is on view at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Boston through November 2, 2014.

Amy Sillman. C, 2007; Oil on canvas; 45 x 39 inches. Collection of Gary and Deborah Lucidon. Photo: John Berens.

Her more recent abstract paintings (she’d say drawings), now on view at the ICA Boston, are certainly framed this way. Each is built up by forming an impulse, trying a layer, reversing it, repainting something new, rotating the painting, reacting to what is there, being surprised, drawing the thing again, and finally ending up with a ream of ideas painted in layers. The resultant painting is like seeing an entire novel or movie as one thing, at one time. They are born of inclusivity. They are filled with cellular veins of information; crowded swills of moments that incorporate their neighbors instead of disregard them.

Amy Sillman. Shade, 2010. Oil on canvas; 90 x 84 inches. Private collection. Photo: John Berens.

It’s so easy to see de Kooning, Guston, or other painters informing Sillman’s work, but that’s just not fair to her. Her work may resemble their works, but it does not rely on them. It’s the wrong question to ask of her. What we are seeing on the canvas is a result of formal uncertainties she confronted in the moment, even as she required her “body to lead her mind.” It is not a circumstance of her having one foot in an art history text. Sillman has struggled with the Abstract Expressionists’ legacy, and she has definitely appropriated parts of their practice. Instead, the similarities of her paintings to mid-century work make me want to redefine the AbEx painters. Were their paintings the results of similar visual doubts and playful discovery? Yes. To focus on their work as more of a result then a spiritual circumstance, redefines them. I find myself thinking they were really Abstract Compositionists under all the art historical spin.

Amy Sillman. # 841 (painting from print from animated drawing), 2012. Oil on canvas; 51 x 49 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NY. Photo: John Berens.

Sillman’s style is not formulaic. If anything, it is consciously inventive. She works very hard to encode these romans à clef. Hidden in her drawings are things that are not what they were when they inspired her, having been transformed. The abstractions that emerged from having two people sit together are a key example. I had no idea what inspired these paintings at first. They are concealed in physical twists of the canvas, camouflage, and overlays. Their referent is slurred and the resulting paintings are first-rate examples of painters being inspired by the mundane and being able to conceal it well.

Amy Sillman. Me and Ugly Mountain, 2003; Oil on canvas; 60 x 72 inches. Collection of Jerome and Ellen Stern. Photo: John Berens.

I’m not sure that Sillman’s compositions should be seen as finished or unfinished. They certainly reject the idea of being provisional. The various marks and layers are related to each other. The more recent paintings are the best evidence. The conscious layers of contrasting colors (blue/orange under yellow/purple) and the resultant subtle shifts of the resulting grays and browns cannot be anything less than deliberately alert work. What constitutes “finished” is, of course, subjective and reveals our expectations for painting, but the work should not be seen as accidents from an inexperienced hand.

Amy Sillman; N & O v3, 2006; Ink, colored pencil and gouache on paper; 17 x 14 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co NY. Photo: John Berens.

Sillman insists that her paintings are drawings and I can sympathize with her. There are plenty of other artists—painters, printmakers, sculptors—that were trained in their chosen medium but kept faithful to their true love, drawing. Where I want to quarrel with her though, is that this denies her painting chops. She’s a painter. She paints really well. Though her heart is devoted to drawing, now that curator Helen Molesworth has deliberated on her career via a retrospective, she should reconsider how much she says that she’s primarily a drafter. It’s pretty obvious that she has some serious painterly skills.

Amy Sillman. Shade, 1997-98; Oil and gouache on wood; 50 x 60 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NY. Photo: John Berens.

The assertion that these works are drawings is itself a political action, which creates a metaphysical tension. If painting is art’s apex predator, then drawing on an ipad is one of the ingredients for chum bait. Sillman has inverted the economic terms in this food pyramid by continuing to draw no matter her materials. These paintings do not fit in my tiny apartment and are not going to be found in a flatfile like works on paper. They do look good on the floor of an art fair. They look fantastic in a white walled museum with guards standing next to them. Her claim that she’s not an apex predator (a painter) and the comedy she uses to diffuse the authority found in her large and commanding paintings belie this show’s reality.

Amy Sillman: one lump or two, curated by Helen Molesworth, is on view at the ICA Boston through January 5, 2014. It will travel to the Aspen Art Museum from February 13 to May 11, 2014, and the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard) from June 28 to September 21, 2014.

Installation view of the 2013 deCordova Biennial. Photo: Clements Photography and Design.

Over the last few years I’ve developed sympathy for those who organize large, all-encompassing exhibits like biennials. If you hold on too tightly to a curatorial vision, you can create an autobiographical list of your favorite artists or styles. If you are too loose with a curatorial vision, you may accidentally create a Rorschach test allowing the public to complain about almost anything, including what others might deem a success.

The deCordova Biennial, now in its third iteration, is a paradox. It’s the type of show that you don’t remember the show, but you remember the work. Walking around it gives you a feeling that something is off, and I think reading the catalog reveals what is causing that feeling. The deCordova Biennial is not one thing. I have complete sympathy for this beast’s curator, but the exhibition doesn’t commit to any vision for art besides the idea that artists in New England are part of a wider network that includes artists outside of New England. The Biennial doesn’t become a Rorschach test because the labels weren’t good enough or for some other technical flaw. It was designed to be a Rorschach test.

Read the full article here.

Steve Lambert, Capitalism Works For Me! True/False, 2011. Aluminum and electronics. 9 x 20 x 7 feet. (Electronics by Alexander Reben) courtesy of the artist and SPACES, Cleveland, OH

In terms of quality, the show runs the range: from phoned-in works that are indistinguishable from the artist’s earlier works to delightfully new works that show expanded range.

The show opens with Steve Lambert‘s Capitalism Works for Me! True/False a giant sign that tallies the audience’s answers to the title. I thought I knew what this politically loaded word meant, but Lambert made me reconsider that. Which capitalism? Am I being asked about the late stages of capitalism (making lots of money without any hindrance from regulations, too big to fail, global motion of capital, etc) or the older, more basic form where private ownership of the means of production is distinguished from state ownership? I have a love/hate relationship with the globalism version. Every artist (or writer for that matter) bases their self-employment on the latter definition. If I say False, I deny my and Lambert’s self-employment, but if I say True, do I align myself with the 1%? The more I considered Lambert’s question, the more I wanted to answer him both ways. I feel like a weasel that can’t commit to one of today’s central wedge issues.

Close reading of Ann Pibal‘s paintings will be rewarded. They are broken linear depictions of space that include balanced formal relationships that mask what feel like unbalanced emotional events. These lines replace what feel like haptic, concrete locations with painted incomplete drawings. This lack of closure forces you to see the relationships in the paintings for what they are. The viewer is asked to reassemble the discontinuities as they see them. What makes these powerful, are not the techniques used (like all abstract art, someone will dismiss it as “my kid can do that” art) but the logic behind why she does what she does. Space turns, curves, and slips along sequential fault lines. What at first appears to be linear regularity is denied the more you consider the relationships hidden in these paintings.

Chris Taylor, Untitled, 2004-2010. Glass, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Chris Taylor‘s glass works are smart, formal proxies that deny their own optics. He explores many angles of craft in his work. His stand-outs are concealed blown glass, simulating something you can get for free at a gas station: styrofoam cups. Taylor does not just reproduce commodity objects though, there are also replicas of famous luxury crafted objects that Taylor used to fool the original makers into refunding his purchase price, claiming his errors were their own. Their substitute status, like Allen MCollum’s surrogates or Jasper John’s sculptures from 1960, are more than just formal tricks and are not just sculptural trompe l’oeil. They are also a witty mocking of tradition that rouses the work into a living relationship with our surrounding culture. Can factory made luxury goods be deluxe if the factory that made them can’t verify that the objects are their own work? You should also not miss his video, Small Craft Advisory, which is hanging in the staircase behind his work.

Installation shot of Mary Lum's work. Photography by Clements Photography & Design, Boston, MA

Mary Lum‘s hybrid photograph-wall-paintings of odd spaces compelled me to spend a lot of time with them. The gestural perspectives of her work are altered, reality becomes unbound, when these works are shown so close to each other. Her close observations of both empty space and objects are absorbing. The masterful flattening and distortions found in her work makes an effortless documentary photo of a street into an inventive composition. A photo of something real is affected by the impossible drawing next to it, while the drawing seems more real with the fake-looking real-thing in tight progression. Each work infects the others and the presentation makes them come alive as an interrelated subject that is bigger than the sum of its parts.

Matthew Gamber, Munsell Color Tree (from the series Any Color You Like), 2010. Digital gelatin silver print. 16 x 20 inches. Courtesy of Gallery Kayafas, Boston, MA.

Matthew Gamber‘s photographs are nerdy, historically and formally. They rely on such a simple conceit: removing color from objects that are defined by their colors. The things in his images need color, relying on it for their function. Making a color wheel monochrome still leaves it looking interesting enough, but a monochrome color blindness test is effectively useless as the data that makes this arrangement of dots into a test is undone, leaving the answer available to the color blind. This project summons a thread of early humanism described in great detail by Simon Schaffer in the BBC documentary Light Fantastic. Light and color are bigger than their physical truths, they affect and define the world we think we know. When photography expands upon the limits of our perceptive abilities, we get in touch with a foundational fear for humanity: that our mastery of knowledge is limited and that what we think is expertise is really just juvenile hubris.

You walk in to a darkish room where ever-changing shapes move like a school of fish across the walls. After your eyes adjust, you find that the there are two benches sitting among six sculptures that are producing the schools of fish and that the fish are made out of nothing but light beams. These sculptures are metal. Simple geometry (sphere, cube, etc). The room is quiet and calming. Everyone who has been here talks about the unexpected smiles that slip onto their cynical faces, and it happens to you too.

Installation view Otto Piene: Lichtballett. Photo: Gunter Thorn. All photos courtesy MIT List Visual Arts Center

To understand what is going on here, you have to look back to the 1960’s, which may have been the high point of art at MIT. During the sixties, arts funding was partially used as a counterbalance to the political consequences from the institute’s complicated and financially fertile military industrial connections. The Center for Advanced Visual Studies (CAVS) was founded in 1967 by Gyorgy Kepes and immediately went about funding exhibitions and visits for some very interesting artists. With the available capital, an unavoidable optimism of postwar boom, and a complete lack of habits (good or bad) Kepes attempted to foster “media geared to all sensory modalities; incorporation of natural processes, such as cloud play, water flow, and the cyclical variations of light and weather; [and] acceptance of the participation of ‘spectators’ in such a way that art becomes a confluence.” (pdf)

Two of the first artists who were invited to visit MIT were Otto Piene and Hans Haacke (as well as Stan VanDerBeek). Piene was in the first round of fellows (meaning he was in residency for a year), and would succeed Kepes as director in 1968. Haacke was invited for a solo show at MIT in 1967. The body of work both presented consisted of systems, those very cloud/water/lights that Kepes hoped to present as art media.

Installation view: Hans Haacke, 1967.

This fall, Haacke’s solo-show has been reproduced at the MIT List Visual Art Center (LVAC). VanDerBeek and Haacke were both deeply influenced by the ideas of cybernetics. Haacke felt that controlling the storm, moving the meteorological indoors, skipped a layer of abstraction and released the artist from reproducing essential features of the world; immediacy was the only type of innovative art left to pursue. Unlike VanDerBeek’s social videos, Haacke created kinetic art systems, objects that set in motion an action that had no end point.

The approachable physicality and comic impossibility of watching a ball float on a jet of air, or seeing a refrigerator coil (covered in frozen ambient humidity) as a sculpture reminds us just how useless art can be; how archaic and aimless we could make our art. These works are unlike our current trends: useful and solemn responses to the internet, the economy, or the social conditions in relation to capitalism. These are objects that bewilder and add to our aesthetic understanding by wonder and query. The closest these sculptures get to being explicit is to make visible the relationship between the whole and the part, between the center and the exterior. 1967 was a very delicate moment in American history: the Vietnam war raging as were race riots, but it was still before the chaos of 1968. Instead of making politics explicit, for which Haacke is usually applauded, these sculptures sing wordless songs about the 1960’s societal changes. These examinations into natural systems granted him tools that he later used to investigate social systems, like the gallery and politics of Germany, but were timely investigations that presage his later work.

Otto Piene: Electric Rose, 1965. Polished aluminum globe with 160 timed neon lamps. Photo: Gunter Thorn

On the other side of the LVAC, Piene’s light sculptures from the 1960 and 1970’s have been painstakingly restored and presented (some for the first time in decades). Despite the opportunity of seeing some vintage Piene sculptures in perfect condition, the two new sculptures, One Cubic Meter of Black Light and Lichtballet steal the show. Both project light through perforations in their skin. Lichtballet is a wall of rotating lights hidden away from sight, the circular pattern of holes in the wall filters the light, manipulating the light into physical motion in the surrounding room. There is almost no reason to look at the objects that Piene has created, instead, you should be looking at their effects on your environment.

The sensations we see flowing around the room are light, directly and with no symbol. Instead of seeing how light lands on a sculptural object, the sculpture provides its own light, and uses the light as a physical material. It may be a sculptural analogy for Plato’s Allegory of the Cave. Has Piene released light from being a shadow on the wall? It’s hard to tell, as every time you step into the room, you are enthralled by the light show’s charms. You immediately forget any theory laden narratives you may have about the work, and instead experience the motion and change for what it is, a grand environment that undercuts words and explanations. It’s a direct experience. It’s that visceral art that we’ve left behind. It’s an example of Kepes hope to present the art object as a confluence, a meeting of viewer and natural process.

Otto Piene: Lichtballett and Hans Haacke: 1967 are on view at the List Visual Arts Center through Dec 31, 2011.

Teresa Margolles, Las Llaves de la Ciudad (detail), 2011. Performance and installation. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Rafael Burillo.

There have been several recent shows considering how art is affected by nationality. Maybe it’s a response to the generic aura found on the floors of art fairs. Disponible at the School of the Museum of the Fine Arts, Boston is a good example that asks what it means to be a Mexican artist. It’s an incomplete exhibition that deserves a books worth of supporting texts, but as a rough exploration of Mexico’s current potential, it’s lucid and descriptive.

The title is taken from Mexico’s empty billboards, advertising that they are not currently taken. Disponible is an ambiguous word, translating to available or changeable. Disponible partially functions as a metaphor for Mexico’s adjustable, compelling, and dynamic contemporary art scene. The title also slyly points to the sizable share of international art sales Mexican artists and galleries are generating (See: Kurimanzutto). After all, the billboards in question are a constant reminder to “the job creators” that they could be enhancing their brands right now.

The most interesting pieces included in Disponible display Mexico as more than a place for drug dealers and low-wage workers. Marcela Armas‘s video Ocupación shows her 2009 performance where she walks like she’s a car in the flow of traffic. She wears a backpack that has an air horn like a car would and she uses it when she has to wait in the string of traffic. The crush of congestion is something we all have insights into, yet can’t keep from happening. It’s a material reality for all seven billion of us.

Hector Zamora, White Noise – Shed 6 Installation (detail), 2011. Installation originally developed for the Auckland Arts Festival, New Zealand. Courtesy of the artist.

Hector Zamora‘s White Noise- Shed 6 is an installation about the relationship between land and colonial rights in New Zealand. After England made New Zealand a colony, land rights were delineated by planting white flags on the borders of private property. Zamora planted 500 flags on a Aukland beach to begin a conversation on this issue and after one day was relegated by the Mayor to exhibiting his work on private property. There was no physical connection to public space after that. This public question was exiled to a private location, transforming his artwork from a sociable interaction into a private sculptural territory. The Mayor tried to exclude the public policy issues and transformed the work from an investigation of a very local, esoteric law to a universal and emblematic colonial critique. Exhibiting it in Boston reflects how it will be a displaced art piece, deported from its appropriate venue no matter where it’s displayed now.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide, I Play The Drums With Frequency (detail), 2007–11. Drum set, sound installation. Courtesy of the artist.

Manuel Rocha Iturbide‘s I Play Drums with Frequency, is the stand out work in Disponible. It’s the least politically formulaic, the most seductively mysterious, and best example of the ambiguity in the title of the show. Is begs the audience to confront their stereotypes about Mexican art. This inventive sound sculpture plays a drum set not with sticks, but with small speakers. A electronic soundtrack composed by Itrubide vibrates the set, and in turn the room. I want to be able to play with this sculpture. I want to put my own soundtracks into the speakers and hear the results. It is a discrete and a most salable object that would look great in an art fair. The noise would draw as much attention as the empty billboards do in a city. “Come buy me! I’m available!”

Disponible, on view at SMFA from September 13- November 19, 2011, was co-curated by Hou Hanru and Guillermo Santamarina for the San Francisco Art Institute. In includes Natalia Almada, Arturo Hernández Alcázar, Edgardo Aragón, Marcela Armas, Manuel Rocha Itrubide, Mauricio Limón, Teresa Margolles, and Hector Zamora

Jimmy

Jaap Pieters, who is touring America for the first time with his silent 8mm films (he will be accompanied by electro-acoustic performances most nights), seems like one of the last types. He began to release his films in an art context during the mid 90’s. The first assortment of works filmed the street outside of his apartment in Amsterdam. He captured fleeting moments outside his window, asking questions about seeing and watching. He consciously captured homeless and drunks as they danced, bummed cigarettes, and staged mini-dramas for an invisible audience.

Kopjesdans (The Cupsdance), Jaap Pieters, 1992. Super 8, 2 Min 20 seconds.

These works challenge you to define them. They are slippery and dispute any single denotation that you provide. How they function is easier to explain than what they are. The assertive voyeurism that underpins these works creates an intimate dreamscape rather than an uncomfortable embarrassment. The images you see– a homeless person moving his or her (it’s hard to tell) collection of shopping carts filled with random detritus for example– are mini dramas, that begin and end as they move out of his window’s frame. Instead of feeling like you’re using them to entertain yourself, you feel like you’re finally actively paying attention to the people involved.

Blikjesman (The Tincanman), Jaap Pieters, 1991. Super 8, 3 min 20 seconds.

Pieters early films are almost all single shots, with no cuts or attempt at symbolic narrative, but there are some later works that have not only cuts, but were not framed by his apartment. 1994’s Raumschiff Schweiz (Spaceship Swiss) begins with what looks like a grey distant mountains surrounded by thick clouds. Slowly a tall cliff is revealed and the camera focuses on a series of waterfalls, trees, and turbulent water. The meaning and significance of any given shot is complicated by the cuts and constant shifting figurative ground that supports Pieters’s images. In the end, the most concrete, formal presentation of an object allows for the most abstract removal for the artist. His concrete surroundings are the least solid. The genuine is the least sturdy.

Spectacle, based in Boston, is a collaborative performance space for the under-programmed edges of music and visual arts.

Jaap Pieter’s travel schedule can be found here. Pieters is traveling and collaborating with musicians/sound artists Evan Lindorff-Ellery and Travis Bird.

The world doesn’t need any more films. The world doesn’t need any more video art. So if you’re going to bring an image into the world, you have to think it through. –Kodwo Eshun

After 50 years of production, distinct periods are appearing in the history of video art. Not distinct ism’s or manifesto driven bubbles, but separate works that seem palpably similar. As the technology used to make movies evolves past the time limits of tape, emerging digital technologies have given artists the ability to create works that seem unlimited in size, length, or production schedule. In 1993, Douglas Gordon laid down the gauntlet by slowing Hitchcock’s Psycho to 2 frames a minute, stretching it into a 24 hour composition. Since then, there have been numerous videos that have tested the stamina of the creators through decade long production schedules or the audience by being unwatchable in one sitting. Boston and Cambridge recently hosted three examples of these monumental works: The Cremaster Cycle, the Otolith Trilogy, and The Clock. Together, these movies point to a new, epic sized production practice and away from traditional art school skills (do any art schools teach bull riding?).

The Cremaster Cycle (Brattle Theatre, October 1-4) is a five movie series filmed between 1994 and 2003. It forms a self-referential system that both functions as a movie and an “Aesthetic System” for Barney’s prints, sculptures, and other ephemera. The entire program hangs on a series of analogies to bodily functions (the title is named after the muscle that raises and lowers the testes) that consider the creative act through a biological motif.

Still from Otolith III. HD Video. © The Otolith Collective. Image courtesy of MIT LIst Visual Art Center

The Otolith Group Trilogy (MIT List Art Center, September 6- 22) was filmed between 2003 and 2009. It is the shortest series considered here, all three movies total under 2 hours, but the production involved a multinational filming schedule, help from more than 8 art groups across multiple continents, and do not include the numerous spin off productions. The Otolith Trilogy is a collage of found film segments and original images. Named for a portion of the inner ear, the otolith structure help us keep our balance and handle the effects of gravity. All three movies are obliquely about the effects of time and how we keep our stability in a changing world. Otolith I (2003), assembled in response to the invasion of Iraq, documents a new species of humans who can only live in low gravity. Otolith II (2007) is primarily a visual comparison between Mumbai’s Dharavi and Le Corbusier’s planned city, Chandigarh. Otolith III (2009) is a prequel to the unrealized film The Alien from Indian director Satyajit Ray.

While The Clock (The MFA, Boston, September 16- December 31) is the most hyped, it’s also the least deliberated of today’s “it” art works.  It’s a 24 hour, continuous blanket of samples from movies and TV where the film mentions or shows a clock on screen indicating the time. These segments are cleverly mixed together to reflect the current time as you are watching.

Chrstian Marclay. Still from The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video, 24 hours. Photo: Todd White Photography.

Each of these video works have supplements that define their character. The Cremaster has numerous sculptures used in filming that have been exhibited with the movies. Seeing it in a movie theater, without the supporting material really drives home that even if you owned copies of the movies, somehow, that extra stuff does make the work feel more ambitious. The Otolith group’s sizable body of work overlaps and functions in a recursive way. Trying to outline the edges of their political activism and their art is a unproductive pursuit. Last, The Clock has made visiting the work an experience; waiting in the line to see it or trying to sketch a database of movies as time progresses. The viewer links the features of the work with the hour that they drop by. The size turns the work into something that you can’t completely experience in the aggregate but also doesn’t prevent the moment from having a distinct sense.

All of these movies were created by groups that have head artists, like a design firms. This doesn’t change how each movie should be received, but does point to collaborative practices as being a successful operational strategy today. Though they were all created in a collaborative environments, the aesthetic framework for each is wildly different.

Still from Otolith I. Video © The Otolith Collective. Image Courtesy of MIT List Visual Art Center.

The Cremaster Cycle is five distinct movies. There are connections between the films, but each stands alone and to decode them you need nothing more than a basic understanding of anatomy (and Masonic rituals for the third movie). Philosophically speaking, the movies are a closed system, that functions independently. Created by traditional filming, the movies have a beginning that flows to an end. Certain portions have stood the test of time, but formally, it feels dated. Their state of the art graphics are passé. The film quality is uneven, the third film (the last filmed) looks best. The myth is just as momentous, but I can’t imagine that this type of work would be possible in today’s economic environment. We should value it for that reason alone: the Cremaster is a time capsule from a time when a gallerist would fund a motivated, but relatively unproven young artist’s five movie cycle and make his career go from promising to prominent.

The Otolith Trilogy is not quite a closed system nor is it a completely unsettled and open ended. Made from a mix of new and historical photos and video, texts spoken over them, and an ambient soundtrack, the result resemble Chris Marker‘s works (Sans Soleil for example). In effect, the trilogy is a collage of real and imaginary events, where “the future feeds forward into the past” creating a confederated present.

The work is a lively montage, but a distinct post-colonial politics shaped these works, so it would be easy to disregard their proficiency as a pedantic heuristic. The non-political elements of each film amplify with repeated viewing, though. Each film is stratified with techniques and themes that are exacting for the viewer. Otolith I is a made up of real events transformed into a visual and textual poem. It asks, but does not answer, if it’s possible to find the courage needed in the face of change. Otolith II concerns itself with the effects of architecture on people. This “reconstruction of gravic space” changes resident’s attitudes and their aspirations. Otolith III questions the capacity to question via artworks. It examines the consequences of our creativity and who owns the lives that are created in narrative.

The Clock, feels larger than you on more than one level. You can’t see the whole thing very easily. Even if you live near one of the institutions that has purchased a copy (MFA Boston/National Gallery of Canada, MoMA, and LACMA), access to the whole 24 hours is hard to come by. It’s a wall of motion and activity from every part of the world and film history. It’s unwilling to reveal the why or what of its aspirations. Why this monster was created, if it a celebration of film’s moments or an allegory, isn’t answered and we are left to unravel what ties the individual moments together, other than obvious sonic and visual associations.

Chrstian Marclay. Still from The Clock, 2010. Single-channel video, 24 hours. Photo: Todd White Photography.

The Clock is a rich tapestry of subjectless players and sounds, with no objective goal. Christian Marclay‘s work depends on emotions and characters that made it through a double editing process, as each movie is edited before he can sample it. Marclay arranges film’s past into the present tense. Breaking the rules at times, implicit watches that don’t explicitly mention the time show that the feeling of these moments are more important than the exact time.

His creative mode is that of a dj rather than a singer/songwriter. Instead of crooning a tightly scheduled album about his/our love life, he selects segments of songs that work together, mixing them in the same witty way a dj cuts and remixes songs live. It’s is one of the best mixtapes I’ve ever looked at. It’s impressive for being able to deliver palpable atmosphere. You go to funerals at 10 AM and not at 10 PM. 6, 7, and 8 PM are different types of after-work experience (commuting, getting drinks, and movie/concert time, respectively). This may be the result of Hollywood’s reductive inclinations. Movies need to be believable and methodical for story telling. Movies distill each moment into consensus, presenting moments that pass our cynical minimum for believability. Despite that, a bad dj can ruin the mood. Marclay does not.

At this point, everyone knows that street artists leave completely unexpected artworks that don’t last long but that are often more absorbing than the works we usually get to see in museums. Because of the ambitious and courageous nature of illegally staking your claim to expression, translating the fresh thoughts and passion of street art into the sedate world of the white cube has always been near impossible.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction (detail), 2011, Courtesy of the artist, Photo: John Kennard

To me, Swoon has always been aware of this. She stands out as having an inherent understanding that “street art” in the modern art market involves that translation. She has unabashedly kept her work from being simple objects; slick, archival consumables that works within the limits set forth by collectors and institutions. To use an analogy, she wants to produce the symbolic rawness of the Andre the Giant sticker, not the corporate efficiency of the Obey brand.

Swoon has been commissioned to create “Anthropocene Extinction” for the Boston ICA‘s fifth installation of the Sandra and Gerald Fineberg Art Wall (on view through Dec 30, 2011). Her work is a sermon built from international symbols of humanity’s relationship to planet Earth. It’s an alluring mural of cut paper and relief prints with an umbilical cord of cut paper party-streamers running to a bamboo sculpture that lives next to the museum’s giant glass elevator. It enlivens the space like no other Fineberg Art Wall installation. The work shows off her skills with lines and drawing, her ability to control color, and the quality of her printing techniques.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Geoff Hargadon for Brooklyn Street Art.

The rhythm and composition of the individual prints/paper cuts is exceedingly regular and controlled. The mural is a hodgepodge of stuff with no given proportion. It’s a scalable image capable of being resized for almost any application. The bamboo sculpture takes after Asian scaffolding. It seems like a pagoda, but has what looks like wedding cakes on it and a beehive surrounded by butterflies at the top. No matter how attractive it is, I’m not sure what it’s supposed to represent or how it relates to the mural.

Swoon’s message relies on the myth of the noble savage. Ms. Bennett, the last living nomad personifies a blameless innocent, a buddha sitting on top of a string of Tibetan deity masks, surrounded by animal totems that represent the extinction in the work’s title. Why Ms. Bennett is 20 times larger than the animals, I’m not sure. It certainly encourages the reading that the animals are less significant than the human. It also seems very Victorian to send out an artists to bring back the last living nomad to a museum setting.

Swoon, Anthropocene Extinction, 2011. Photo: Black Rainbow Extraordinaire Magazine.

Not that it makes it less of a work, but this installation has nothing to do with street art. It uses wheatpaste, but is that all it takes to be a street artist? The work as exhibited is a printstallation; a hybrid format (of installation made from or about prints) that has been a part of the print community for years. Do street artists get shipping budgets and 9 days with a crew of 5 plus an equal amount of student assistants to put up their work? To insist that this is a street art piece implies that her work is so unexplainable and independent from the norm of contemporary art that she’s some kind of freak outsider. She is an artist. An artist who still leaves jewels for people to find on the street, but an artwork in a museum does not parallel the relationship between artwork and street.

Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Untitled, date unknown Gelatin silver print, 6 5/8 x 5 3/4 in. All images © The Estate of Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

That’s when he found his new calling. He fell for the technical questions that plague all photographers. To this run of the mill mix of lighting, focal lengths, and shutter speed he added things things that were found in his personality and in the counterculture of the 60’s. It seems like such a cliche to be a beatnik cultural warrior, but he was, and the body of work he produced during the 60s is remarkable.

Starting in 1961, he gave himself a decade to master photography. He had been a member of the Lexington Camera Club for six years by that point and was comfortable with standard photographic issues. Instead of casting a wider net he dug in to a narrower focus: Rolleiflex mid-size monochrome negatives and small prints. After eliminating any question of what camera to use, he was free to care about what would be his subject.

Meatyard, Ambrose Bierce, 1964 Gelatin silver print, 7 x 7 1/4 in.

On weekends, Meatyard would drive around looking for the crumbling ruins in the rural poverty that surrounded Lexington, KY, but not so he could shoot “ruins porn” or look for the personification of rural life like Shelby Lee Adams did in Appalachia. His children, who had grown up with a shutterbug dad were often his models. The images he took of them were not casual shots of kids at play in the backyard but were arresting compositions guided by his counterculture beliefs and framed with serious technical skill.

The Art Institute of Chicago currently has a first-rate exhibition of the images from his peak output. Ralph Eugene Meatyard: Dolls and Masks collects together Meatyard’s dense compositions, structures of silver and gray with doll faces hiding in the corners of crumbling architecture. He would allow his children to pose as they wanted to, there are a few repeats in their positions, but it adds to the mystery. His formal compositions and his subject matter seems impenetrable. His photographic explorations, motivated by zen philosophy and jazz improvisations, are a dense network of subconscious associations and uncanny resemblance. The natural, fleeting poses of his children fracture against the ponderous old man masks and oversized hands in which they are posing. Their bodies stand out against the stark and worn naturally lit backgrounds that often contain thick, unlit darkness.

Meatyard, Untitled, date unknown Gelatin silver print, 7 3/8 x 7 3/8 in.

Many of his images violate what we know to be true, but he never intended to photograph what was there. He was uninterested in mere optical facts or creating reassuring images. Instead, he wanted to create anew a universal subject that stood for something. He quotes Ambrose Bierce‘s Devils Dictionary in at least one title “Romance, n. Fiction that owes no allegiance to the God of Things as They Are.” His “sympathetic general subject” looks back to the type of images religions around the world used to teach the illiterate: Buddhist Thangkas, Eastern Icons, Catholic Altarpieces, etc. These images of people idealize rather than describe their subjects. Meatyard too does this, consciously forcing the subject into the uncanny valley between living creature and lifeless doll.

Like the religious icon, Meatyard’s figures are telling us something about how to live, who we are, and what we should expect in the future, it’s just impossible to definitively know what they are saying. A combination of “The Child is father of the Man” and “Show me your original face before your mother and father were born” these images challenge the viewer with “unfair arguments with existence.” Do the masks cover up the person, or does the person fill in the mask? Every subject in Meatyard’s photos are challenging the lens of the camera. Actively standing up to any amount of objectifying gaze, deformed but confident, these subjects go eyeball to eyeball with us. Even the youngest and presumably most innocent of these subjects stands facing us, boldly answering the questions his father was asking.

Rick Araluce. The Longest Hours (detail), 2011. Wood, plastic, paper, mixed media, electronic components, audio components. Courtesy of the artist.

The exhibition is filled with superb work from thirty-eight artists, showing the breadth of this theme. The first topic that jumps out of Otherworldly is dichotomies (both for times real and imagined, future and past, manufactured and natural), followed by nostalgia. There are numerous objects made about the maker’s youth. You can hear the string music and see the soft-focus filters as they sift through impossibly perfect memories of impossibly perfect places. I don’t think we should write off all remembrance as sentimentality, and yet, this show is thick with recording events as they should be remembered rather than how they were. The more the works are preoccupied with nostalgia, the less I feel that they are approachable.

Rick Araluce is one of the standouts from this show, though he mentions that his work may contain nostalgia, I don’t buy it. His dioramas are not memories or as he puts it, he is “not trying to create an historical scenario.” His “poetic, textural, miniature world” seems empty and full at the same time. Instead of centering on feigning space or time, his sculptures create scenes charged with potentialities. This scene could be a horror movie or a family home. His interest in subliminal context rather than panoramas is furthered by half-finished models permeated with empty space and open-ended devices.

Jimbo Blachly and Lytle Shaw, editors of the Chadwick Family Papers . The Golden-Age Microbrewery, 2008. Wood, found objects, balsa wood, paint, fabric, plaster. Courtesy of Winkleman Gallery, New York.

The Chadwicks‘ Golden-Age Microbrewery is a complicated mess, and I mean that in the most positive way possible. The model for the kitchen is captured in video and photographs as the two editors of the Chadwicks’ papers recreate a model of a Dutch kitchen and then read a written text while throwing around objects from Dutch paintings (Peach pit, chicken leg, lemon, spoon: Beware the floor where pewter’s strewn). This work is thick with historical references and forms a disorderly slurry that forces multiple viewings in order to take it all in. The two editors interactions with the model are as interesting as the object, the film, or the photos.

The Chadwicks are focused not on nostalgia, or even the ironic hipster version of mustache having, iconoclastic, genre blending retro-futurism. They are nerdy historically minded visual researchers who are led by their material to create work in their own voice. Should we accuse Gilbert and George of nostalgia? I believe that the Chadwicks fit the model created by Gilbert and George in their devotion to the document and in their persistent drive to create formally and socially compelling art.

Bethany de Forest and Robin Noorda. Raspberry field, 2009 (still from Red-End and the Seemingly Symbiotic Society). Digital animated film; Time: 14’35. Courtesy of the artists.

Bethany de Forest‘s brightly colored video, photos, and sculptures are in stark contrast to the weathered realism elsewhere in the show. She uses non-art materials (mostly food items) to create landscapes that form believable proportions, but are unrecognizable fantasies. Her landscapes slip into hazy dreamscapes filled with anthropomorphic insects in conflict. Her pin hole camera images of cars rushing around on unusual highways with repeating inverted Eiffel towers reveals how these works are made. She builds small boxes with mirrored walls, allowing the scene to repeat in the reflections. They are memorable visions that are inventive and hallucinatory.

Gregory Euclide. held within what hung open and made to lie without escape, 2011. Acrylic, acrylic caulk, cast paper, fern, foam, goldenrod, hosta, moss, paper, pencil, PETG, sedum, sponge, wood. Courtesy of the artist; David B. Smith Gallery, Seattle. Photo: Ed Watkins.

Gregory Euclide‘s mutated painting spills off of the wall and on to the floor. His landscapes are created with a balanced level of abstraction and environmental lecture and are still aesthetically absorbing. In this landscape the image has overfilled its frame, the water runing over the edge of the frame and on to the floor. The floor has plastic bottles filled with sand and trees cut from flat white paper. At the other end of the floor sculpture is another waterfall, running through a landscape held up by thin wooden sticks. Both water sources meet in the middle of a landscape of invasive species and simulated rocks that were cast from boulders in central park.

Patrick Jacobs. Room with Radiator, 2011. Wood, extruded styrene, acrylic, hair, paper, ash, talc, starch, acrylite, vinyl film, copper, steel, lighting, BK7 glass. Courtesy of the artist.

Patrick Jacobs‘s work runs in two veins: urban interiors and picturesque landscapes. They are captured and viewed behind a curved glass that exaggerates and increases their intended effect. Where de Forest’s work stays within natural proportions, Jacobs shatters any level of plausible depth. You see a two to three inch piece of glass that is holding a whole field or a room in an apartment. The full-size world is brought down to fantasy size fitting into a bubble embedded into the wall.

Jacobs’s work depends on captivating visions that recognize both sides of the ugly and beauty polarity. The urban apartment is attractive and the rosebush is harsh in his hands. He makes both subjects startling and nervous, even though the scene is silent and motionless. That silence is not relaxed, it may have to do with the “strangely tactile reality” he is able to produce. This tangible reminder of the physical exists only in our minds. The bubble is not in the wall, where an object is, but in what and how we perceive his sculpture. This psychological distortion is attractive, an intangible falseness that can neither be grasped nor distinguished as real or fake. We can just regard this experience and the repercussions hidden within it.

Yokohama Linework from 2005 is a point-of-view video (here projected on the floor) of a skateboard traveling through Yokohama. The line he traces through the city is like an abstract drawing. It’s a linear composition with no narrative, an urban outline functioning as a self-portrait. He alludes to his own personal interests outside of art in this and other early videos, creating a caricature of the internationally wandering extreme athlete.

Shaun Gladwell, Interceptor Surf Sequence 2009. All images courtesy Wadsworth Atheneum

Anytime an artist brings in their own hobbies, it seems we then have to call it a form of pop art. Gladwell does directly engage popular movies in his MADDESTMAXIMVS series (2005-2009). After recreating Max’s Interceptor, he filmed two almost identical videos of an black-clad anonymous outlaw surfing on the top of the moving car. These two parts of Surf Sequence, one shot on a clear day and the other in front of a storm, were filmed in slow-motion, elongating the activity and emphasizing the surrounding landscape. This leads the audience to consider both the action and the surrounding Australian landscape.

There is a remarkably different feeling in his Apologies 1-6. Instead of being the outlaw engaged in risky behavior seemingly for fun, the outlaw now is following truckers in the outback of Australia, removing and caressing the resulting roadkill. The kangaroos that he picks up immediately echo Joseph Beuys’s How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare, but there is an additional layer here in that he is still portraying his Mad Max character. Is there a soft-side, an empathetic and socially liberal message in Mad Max that I don’t remember? The outlaw in Gladwell’s Apologies is an almost mushy, a gently affectionate human who spends time caring for these dead animals that have fallen at man’s mercenary hands.

Shaun Gladwell, Apologies 1-6, 2007-09

Gladwell is presumably carving out a space for the extreme sports enthusiast to have these feelings. Instead of just being a reactionary, everlasting man-child, Gladwell inserts an adult concern into this video game character stereotype. It would be impossible to simultaneously be a thinking person and a slave to the x-games formula of masculinity. Gladwell’s video still of a soldier balancing his gun on his hand allows another inquiry into masculinity. The pigeonholed roughneck is shown in a more casual playful note. Instead of considering the scars left behind by war, in the manner of Sophie Ristelhueber, Gladwell is offering up a quiet moment of humanity that looks foreign as a soldier.

The gun in this film still is similar to the prosthetic devices (skateboard, stilts, and crutches) in a trio of videos culled from his Pataphysical suite. These images of humans using tools to spin returns to his interest in extreme sports, but instead of placing the artist at center, he films hired performers to enact these physical actions.

Shaun Gladwell, Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi), 2010

His most most recent video on display, Pacific Undertow Sequence (Bondi) brings all these themes together. Gladwell sits on a surfboard, but something looks strange about this. What’s going on is that he is upside down, the sun is below him; the light is coming from the bottom to top, he has to lean down to get air, and the waves we see crashing are the undertow of each wave. Gladwell is engaged with an extreme sport again, but instead of being macho and powerful master of improbable motion, he is at the impulses of the tide. Underwater, unable to breath freely, his athleticism keeps him alive. There is another subtle symmetrical landscape with another single actor. Present again is his connection to the outdoors but it doesn’t function on a literal level, have a pedantic message to get across, or refer to a single device. It’s more physical and powerful than conceptual. Trying to sit still on a surf board might be his most vigorous work yet and his most understated.

Matrix 162, Shaun Gladwell is on display at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford CT from June 2- September 18, 2011

Marianne Mueller, FreePort No. 002 (Any House Is a Home, 2011). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

One way of considering the meaning hidden in a collection is to open it to an artist. Of course, by allowing these creators access to your stacks, you allow them to consider your museum’s position within the community of museums. The latent desires of the past reveal themselves as current realities. Like mirrors, a museum’s various collections reflect our personal and social spirit. It’s a brave decision to reverse the reflecting surface inward, showing what the museum has become and what it has accumulated over time.

Following this logic, The Peabody Essex Museum commissioned the FreePort series, an ongoing exhibition series installed within the museum’s permanent displays. In October of 2010, Charles Sandison‘s projected installation, FreePort [No.001] or Figurehead, launched the series. Sandison began by studying the PEM library’s collection of captain’s logs, and produced a lengthy, computer-based text that was projected in the East India Marine Hall (one of the oldest parts of the museum).  Sandison’s projected text circulated around the room, moving in computer-controlled flows that forced viewers to try to find sense in an immersive environment of words.  Even though Sandison didn’t express any value judgements, the piece was a chaotic report on what texts the museum finds most important.

Charles Sandison, FreePort No. 001 (Figurehead, 2010). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

This past March, Marianne Mueller, a Swiss artist known for her formal photographic explorations, installed the second FreePort work: FreePort [No. 002], or Any House Is a Home. Her vigorous engagement with PEM’s collection resulted in a installation of forty-one of Mueller’s photos, three new video portraits, very specific paint colors in blocks on the wall, and over 150 objects and images from PEM. An exacting installation layered with possible meanings, opposition is the first theme that jumps out. Objects are placed in relation to each other, forcing comparisons to be made between them. Even the painted walls are alive with polarities: sometimes the paint color matches the art work, while at other times the color opposes the chosen object.

Mueller hopes that these relationships are formally exciting, instead of connotative and bound with personal narrative. One of the more successful moments is a pair of especially rare elastic chairs by the eighteenth-century furniture maker Samuel Gragg, placed back to back in a display case from the early 1900s. Their formal qualities, including the curved motion of their backs, are enhanced by this display. The display case surrounds them and becomes a likeness of the museum that holds and collects. The case, purchased for the protection of the chairs, is presented as a piece in the museum’s collection.  The protection becomes as much the subject as the object on display.

Mueller has added a personal theme that connects to her own career by creating an extensive photographic archive. The home and house, an emotional connection to a space, comes from a shared history with a space as much as anything else. Mueller’s intention to create an “open-ended associative field rather than a narrative” fights against this notion. Her intention to “liberate objects from history” and bring them into the present questions the authority of the museum to map and define the objects in their care via a historical timeline or a specifically defined function. This is as true for the museum as it is for Mueller’s personal archive of photographs; her artistic home. Her years of engaging with her own personal archive allows her intense insights into the museum’s archive that may be overlooked by other artists who are invited to respond to the museum’s collection.

Marianne Mueller, FreePort No. 002 (Any House Is a Home, 2011). Mixed media installation. Image courtesy of PEM.

Also currently on display is FreePort [No.003], a sound piece and installation from Susan Philipsz. Philipsz chose to sing a ballad from a book of English and Scottish ballads in the PEM collection. “The House Carpenter’s Wife (The Daemon Lover),” tells the story of a man who returns home from the sea after a long absence to find his former lover with a husband and a child. The eight parts of this installation riff off of the figureheads and portraits of old captains in the East India Marine Hall, bringing the objects’ hidden narratives to the fore.

Freeport [No. 002], by Marianne Mueller, is on view at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, through December 31, 2011.  Freeport [No. 003], by Susan Philipsz, is on view through November 1, 2011.  Freeport [No. 004], by Peter Hutton, will be on view from September 1, 2011, through December 31, 2011.